Students relate to J.D. Salinger’s book of teen pain

Copies of J.D. Salinger's classic novel "The Catcher in the Rye" as well as his volume of short stories called "Nine Stories" are seen at the Orange Public Library in Orange Village, Ohio on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, died Wednesday at the age of 91. At left is a 1951 photo of the author. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta)
— AP

Copies of J.D. Salinger's classic novel "The Catcher in the Rye" as well as his volume of short stories called "Nine Stories" are seen at the Orange Public Library in Orange Village, Ohio on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, died Wednesday at the age of 91. At left is a 1951 photo of the author. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta)
/ AP

A NEW ‘CATCHER’?

Many high school English teachers consider 1951’s “The Catcher in the Rye” a peerless account of adolescent angst. But several more recent novels, teachers suggest, come close to capturing J.D. Salinger’s magic:

•“The Body of Christopher Creed” (2000) by Carol Plum-Ucci. Like Holden Caulfield, Christopher is a boarding school misfit. “Could be considered a warm-up for ‘Catcher in the Rye,’” Granite Hills’ Gerald Lopez said.

•“The Outsiders” (1967) by S.E. Hinton. This is Caley O’Neil’s choice, but the Montgomery High teacher said “it’s nowhere in the league of ‘Catcher in the Rye.’”

•“The Poisonwood Bible” (1998) by Barbara Kingsolver. A teenage girl is one of the narrators. “The children are kind of enraptured by the voices of these women,” Valhalla’s Tom Waldron said.

•“Rule of the Bone” (1994) by Russell Banks. Spanier called it a “fantastic” updating of “The Catcher in the Rye” and Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” Still, “I don’t think it holds together as successfully as those two books.”

Obituary: J.D. Salinger, the celebrated yet reclusive author, died at age 91.

At Carlsbad High School, Jeff Spanier teaches it every fall.

At Coronado High School, Heather Bice teaches it toward the end of winter.

At Granite Hills High School in El Cajon, Gerald Lopez teaches it each spring.

For these English teachers, J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” is a book for all seasons — and they suspect that Salinger, who died Wednesday at the age of 91, may have given us a novel for all time.

“It’s not my favorite book,” Spanier confessed, “but it is my favorite book to teach. The children just eat it up.”

Still? This novel is old enough to earn an AARP card. Not only was “The Catcher in the Rye” published in 1951, its main character and narrator, Holden Caulfield, is the product of a well-off East Coast family who has been expelled from prep school.

“It’s certainly not your typical Southern California public school kid’s experience,” said Tom Waldron, an English teacher at El Cajon’s Valhalla High School. “But today he still speaks to children who feel some of the same anxiety and cynicism about the adult world.”

While the 59-year-old book is dated — Holden notes that a Jaguar costs $4,000; today, that might not buy a used Corolla — “The Catcher in the Rye” is a staple of high school English classes. By the time students meet Holden, most have already grappled with the 19th-century whirligigs of “Moby Dick” and “The Scarlet Letter.”

While Hester Prynne is pinned to a vanished era, Holden is the eternal American adolescent. Like teens then and now, he is direct, funny, angry, wounded and confused. Teetering between a boy’s helplessness and a man’s responsibilities, he’s dissatisfied with the present yet terrified by the future.

Holden and “The Catcher in the Rye” have become cultural touchstones. The novel appears on film in “Annie Hall” and in the paranoid thriller “Conspiracy Theory”; on TV, Holden is lauded by a character in “Boy Meets World”; and there’s a 1990s alt-rock band, The Caulfields.

For generations, readers have recognized themselves in the novel’s main character. “For me, reading Holden Caulfield for the first time, it was like Salinger had captured my own voice,” Waldron said.

“I really liked his sarcasm and his tone,” said Sammy Hemp, 17, a Coronado High junior whose International Baccalaureate English class tackled the book in October. “I thought Holden was a great character.”

Waldron, who in 2009 was named one of five county Teachers of the Year, estimates that three out of four students embrace Holden.

Those who don’t tend to be the rare breed who breeze through high school and adolescence. “They’ve never experienced the kind of alienation that Holden has,” Waldron said. “He really is kind of a loser.”

Most teens are familiar with Holden’s conflicting emotions as he struggles toward adulthood and grapples with family tragedy.

“Everyone feels alienated at some point,” Bice said. “Even if it is by choice because you hate the way society says you should be.”

The novel’s appeal may be strongest among students who believe they don’t quite fit in, who, like Holden, are convinced that most adult and adolescent role models are “phonies.” Caley O’Neil, a Montgomery High School teacher of AP English, first read the book as a disgruntled ninth-grader in Catholic school.

“I was a misfit and this book changed me forever,” she said. “It opened up a door. It made me want to teach.”

In classrooms, “The Catcher in the Rye” can work a strange magic. Good students read and appreciate the novel. But Salinger’s voice and message are embraced and loved by “the regular children that hate to read, the children that are turned off to reading in general,” O’Neil said. “Once I get them into this book, there’s no stopping them.”

Perhaps this is because the book, while ostensibly telling the story of an ordinary teen with extraordinary troubles, is densely layered. Like many classics, “The Catcher in the Rye” becomes richer when readers have more background.

Before delving into “The Scarlet Letter,” Spanier introduces his AP English students to the Transcendentalist movement. Before reading “The Catcher in the Rye,” he lectures on the psychology and stages of grief.

“We know Holden is a smart kid,” Spanier noted. “So why is he flunking out of school? There are hints in the book. He didn’t attend his brother’s funeral. His parents will spent money on him, but they don’t even know him.”

In this light, the hypercritical Holden becomes more sympathetic because the 17-year-old narrator recounts events that happened when he was 16 — exactly the ages of high school juniors.

“It’s not just about a rich kid complaining, it is about a kid who wants to go home, who is stuck in these cycles of grief,” Spanier said. “Once the students get that, they eat it up.”

It helps that Holden is wonderfully quotable. Take his comment in Chapter 3: “What really knocks me out is a book, when you’re all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

Yesterday morning, O’Neil was notified of J.D. Salinger’s death. She was told by her students, some of whom were teary-eyed.